The U.S. Military Is Determined to Dodge Responsibility for the Afghan Airstrike

"I've ordered a thorough investigation into this tragic incident and the investigation is ongoing," U.S. Army Gen. John Campbell said. "The Afghans ordered the same. If errors were committed we'll acknowledge them. We'll hold those responsible accountable and we will take steps to ensure mistakes are not repeated."

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This guy really earned his pay. "If errors were committed"? I mean,"if"? What in the unholy hell is that? You blew the shit out of a fully staffed—and fully functioning—hospital. There are only two alternatives. Either you deliberately lit up the hospital, in which case somebody—or a whole lot of somebodies—is guilty of a war crime, or a "mistake" clearly was made. The hospital didn't blow itself up. The conditional is always the accomplice—the Bianchi to the passive voice's Buono.

I was sleeping in our safe room in the hospital. At around 2am I was woken up by the sound of a big explosion nearby. At first I didn't know what was going on. Over the past week we'd heard bombings and explosions before, but always further away. This one was different - close and loud. At first there was confusion, and dust settling. As we were trying to work out what was happening, there was more bombing. After 20 or 30 minutes, I heard someone calling my name. It was one of the Emergency Room nurses. He staggered in with massive trauma to his arm. He was covered in blood, with wounds all over his body. At that point my brain just couldn't understand what was happening. For a second I was just stood still, shocked. He was calling for help. In the safe room, we have a limited supply of basic medical essentials, but there was no morphine to stop his pain. We did what we could.

And Glenn Greenwald is absolutely correct in pointing out two things – 1) that this atrocity would have been buried in the news cycle had it not been perpetrated upon a facility operated by Doctors Without Borders, which is one of the truly noble organizations in the world, and also one that is extremely media-savvy, and 2) that the American press has been willing to swallow whatever changing alibi the Pentagon has been willing to dish up. Yesterday, on Wolf Blitzer's program, he did a segment on the bombing of the hospital, and followed it up with a piece by noted military shill Barbara Starr on General "Joe" Votel, the chief of special operations at the Pentagon, in which General Joe and Barbara went on at length at how tough it is for "Special Ops" to root out terrorists around the world. Which is obviously true, but I refuse to believe that this programming juxtaposition was any more of an accident than lighting up that hospital was.

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The military of the world's longest standing democracy is now spending its time ducking and dodging, and blaming our plucky Afghan allies, for committing an act so heinous that it would have embarrassed Goering. This is the kind of thing that happens when you make war in a place and you fight it from the air – which should give pause to the people who want to ladle a few onto Syria and (maybe) Iran, but which obviously won't. That is no excuse, however. Whatever mistakes "were" made, this was a war crime, pure and simple, and the people who ordered it, and the people who carried it out, should be held to serious account, which they obviously won't be. And, maybe, it's time to think (again) about why in the hell we're still making war at all in that godforsaken part of the world.